A/N: You know those AUs in which you can only see colors once you've met your soulmate and as long as they're alive... This is one of those. But it's a drabble series, starting pre-show canon and mostly following canon story in S1 (I've been thinking about this since I learned what soulmates AU were!). Last one is a time jump!
What color is love?
I wrote a song for you.
She's sixteen and it's both a curse and a wonder to be still living in grayscale, but she doesn't mind. She never knew any different.
Callie tries to explain sometimes, what colors are, she has a way with words that makes her feel them. She tells her her eyes are the color of hot tea when it warms your insides, her shirt is a shade of cool air from the vent in the common room, her hair is the taste of iron, Earth is droplets of water on smooth glass.
Abby loves the smell of old paper and it's yellow.
Look how they shine for you.
Sometimes it happens, some people find their soulmate and their world suddenly bursts with color, and that's how they know. Some people spend a lifetime in grayscale. And some others, like Callie, land eyes on their half too soon to understand its meaning, in early childhood, and waste the rest of their time trying to find them again the old fashioned way.
When Abby's vision fills with blues and purples and stripes of rusty browns for the first time it's in the mess hall, staring stupidly at two young men asking if they can sit next to her and Callie.
I came along.
There's a girl he's never seen before, with black sleek hair and warm skin, sitting with a friend in the mess hall.
While everything around her gradually shines with a hue, all he can see is the deep drawing black of her eyes, pulling like the empty space outside.
He doesn't even wait for Jake to catch up, he skirts the blues and the shades of red, the pale pink and the faded green, to sit with her. The hardest part is to stay still even when her world doesn't jump in a pool of colors like his just did.
Look at the stars.
Jake tells her only five years later, when she's trying to get dressed and he keeps riding her shirt up, that it was Kane's call that day. Marcus saw Callie sitting with her and his eyes burned with hues for the first time. They only met thanks to Kane, and that's why he's going to be at their wedding.
Abby sighs. She only knows what she sees and so far it's her best friend's once beautiful smile now fading into indigo because it's a teeth and nails and shouting matches kind of love with Marcus. She'll never understand their tint.
And all the things that you do.
Sparks of beryl and metallic silver flare when her temper rises, her skin burns with hues of ruby and shadows of jade when they debate on opposite sides, and colors glow, more vivid, and more real, for hours afterwards.
Those times she remembers Callie quietly admitting Marcus must be her one. He's uncompromising and harsh, she says, but I've never seen so clear and bright colors than when I'm with him. Those times she goes back to Jake and lets the hues vibrate against her closed eyelids, flashes of amber and coral between kisses, and golden flowers in the dark.
Something beautiful.
He loves Callie. She's light and soft and sweet, and most of all she's still black and white. But her ink has never been so warm, bubbling with life and that multitude of lights, containing them all, like laughters, inside.
Every spark of onyx and silver, or twinkle of diamond, flaring when he confronts Abby, cannot compare.
Callie will never know for sure, but she stays. Even when she's not his first priority, even when he never proposes, never fully commits, because Marcus knows, deep down, fear is black too, but only her black is the right shade of dark.
Oh what a thing to do.
She's not ready to go back to a life in grayscale, the dull, monotonous accent of shadows mingling with equally tedious dim lights. Life is unthinkable without colors. Unbearable without Jake.
She squeezes her eyes to this already muted world, holding him in her embrace, hoping to commit the feel of them in her memory and of him in her arms.
She convinces herself it's only because of Clarke that even when the hatch opens and her husband disappears in empty space she can still see fainting shades of something once warm.
Rage, she learns that day, is deep red.
So then I took my turn.
Colors flare and flicker like waves for days after Callie does what she does, pale greens and bright reds, muted hues like sorrow and flashes of pulsing anger. Callie is gone.
Abby looks into Kane's eyes imagining his world fading. The ultimate punishment, the rest of his life in grayscale, without her. He stares back at her and a rush of steel cold grey beats through her. Then he blinks and it's gone.
He has no child to carry on that little bit of his half, and ten days later three hundred more people die because he lost all hope.
I drew a line.
He hates the colors, hates the sight of them, but if he closes his eyes lights still dance in the dark and he feels indigo dye his warm blackness.
He wants to cry but even tears are tainted, she's everywhere still, yet not anymore.
He catches Abby's stare in the morgue and feels steel cold grey crawling at the edges. Callie is gone. Reds like blood pulse and mute any other. He blinked and their tint flickered and he knew she pulled the trigger.
He hates the colors, hates the sight of them, because she's gone and they're still there.
I jumped across for you.
Black is dense and sticky, it clings to her skin and burns tears brighter than light. Black is all there is for hours.
Then something warmer and heavier is there, touching her, shaking her with flashes of earthy browns and drops of pure white in the dark.
He came for her crawling, holding onto that fainting flickering of colors as she dropped in and out of consciousness.
I should have known it was you, he whispers against her hair, holding her close as bright hues of yellow pulse in time with his heartbeat under her fingertips, It was always you.
And it was all yellow.
They found each other again, over twenty years later, with only a handful of hours to spare. And it's all there: blues that feel like water on glass, reds so vibrant they warm inside, greens like cool air. Most of all she feels the smell of old paper hanging between them, and it's yellow.
Then they collide, blend silver and gold, and millions of shades in between, so vivid and pure they linger with her even later, before they crash and burn to Earth, when they lie tangled in bed, just breathing again, watching stars swim in black empty space.
I swam across.
It must be hope. It's hanging between greens and yellows, stripping his world bare to a few clueless sparks that smell like her, even when everyone else is gone, the ground is lost and his dark is the wrong shade of black.
Maybe he found her and maybe she guided him, but he still pushes to his feet when they ring for a martyr and steel cold grey flashes in her eyes. There has to be another way. They touch and it's not yellow, it's white, like guilt, like the light filtering between his fingers when they land on Earth.
You know I love you so.
She never wonders what it could have been. She thinks of Clarke, existing, and little else matters.
Earth is beautiful and full of new, different, vibrant colors for them, shimmering on the surface and lingering inside, comforting, till, months later, white is never pure and black is the right shade of warm again.
In spring she follows his trail of clues and finds him working in the vegetable garden, kneeled on dark earth, smiling up at her with sunkissed skin and messy hair, the befitting shape of love, in the patch he kept for flowers. And they were all yellow.
A/N2: I really gotta thank catelynstxrks for the beta (and ellana-san for the patience) but I still own my mistakes =P